Maths bea­con for women

MARYAM Mirza­khani, a Stan­ford Univer­sity pro­fes­sor who was the first and only woman to win the pres­ti­gious Fields Medal in math­e­mat­ics, has died.

Mirza­khani, who bat­tled breast can­cer, died on Satur­day aged 40, the univer­sity an­nounced.

In 2014 Mirza­khani was one of four win­ners of the Fields Medal, which is pre­sented ev­ery four years and is con­sid­ered the math­e­mat­ics equiv­a­lent of the No­bel prize. She was named for her work on com­plex ge­om­e­try and dy­namic sys­tems.

“Mirza­khani spe­cialised in the­o­ret­i­cal math­e­mat­ics that read like a for­eign lan­guage by those out­side of math­e­mat­ics: mod­uli spa­ces, Te­ich­muller the­ory, hy­per­bolic ge­om­e­try, Er­godic the­ory and sym­plec­tic ge­om­e­try,” ac­cord­ing to the Stan­ford press an­nounce­ment. “Mas­ter­ing th­ese ap­proaches al­lowed Mirza­khani to pur­sue her fas­ci­na­tion for de­scrib­ing the geo­met­ric and dy­namic com­plex­i­ties of curved sur­faces- spheres, dough­nut shapes and even amoe­bas, in as great de­tail as pos­si­ble.”

The work had im­pli­ca­tions in fields rang­ing from cryp­tog­ra­phy to “the the­o­ret­i­cal physics of how the uni­verse came to ex­ist,” the univer­sity said.

Mirza­khani was born in Tehran, Iran, and stud­ied there and at Har­vard Univer­sity.